Well, this Orewa development's giving fast-track consenting a very bad name, isn't it? I am absolutely gobsmacked. I am no property developer, but I would have thought you wouldn't apply to put up hundreds and hundreds of houses before you had, if you’ll excuse me, your shit together, quite literally. The decision to greenlight a 1,217 home development on the outskirts of Orewa has attracted heavy criticism from the Auckland mayor, the council, local residents, and just about everybody you speak to. And deservedly so. Vineway Limited plans to build the homes, a commercial area, two neighbourhood parks, some ecological areas to tick the box, and construct a State Highway 1 interchange. All very admirable, but where's the wastewater pipes? And the water pipes full stop. Lovely to have a little ecological area where you can rediscover a sparkling skink, but what about the pipes? 

There isn't the capacity from Watercare to deliver water, get rid of the waste for the more than a thousand homes in the commercial space. Watercare has made it abundantly clear that it cannot connect any services to the site before 2033, potentially 2050, so why in heaven's name would you allow a housing development of this size to go ahead? We've been there, we've done that, it doesn't work. Two years ago, Watercare was trucking sewage from new housing developments while infrastructure was being built to cope with the waste. But they said two years ago this wasn't working. It was expensive, it was smelly, it was complex. So they said no, we're not going to approve any new resource consents that require an interim wastewater solution. And they did oppose this Orewa one. 

Back at the time they were talking about servicing Cardinal West, a housing development on a former dairy farm. There were 300 homes there, in the first stage they were planning 417 odd. There were 300 homes, and to service those 300 homes Watercare had to make 90 trips a week to remove the sewage. 90 for 300 homes. How many trips would it take to get rid of the waste from 1,217 homes? Can I remind you too, because this is why it's so incomprehensible; if this was a first where you had a housing developer saying, “Hey, I know we haven't got any pipes to connect to the water infrastructure and the wastewater infrastructure, and I know we won't get them till about 2050 but what about we truck water in and take the treated sewage away?" And if that was the first time it had been suggested, you might think, “Well, that sounds half baked, but nonetheless let's give it a go, let's not be negative Nancys, let's just, we need housing." Look at them. It doesn't work. That's why Watercare said no. 

And can I remind you of Auckland's Whitford Manor, described by planners as a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when developers build houses in areas where public water pipes have yet to reach. Spelling it out for the property developers out there. Over the years, every plan for a private wastewater system at Whitford Manor collapsed. A deal to pipe waste across a neighbouring golf course fell through, shock me. And a backup plan to dump it in a nearby creek was killed in the High Court by conservationists and iwi, and I don't blame them. It didn't work 150 years ago, we're still dealing with the problems of just using natural waterways to dump our crap into and our arsenic and our poisons from the factories. Look at the creeks around Grey Lynn, they're still recovering. 

So what in God's name are we doing in Orewa? Watercare held up Whitford Manor's failure as one of the reasons to object to other housing projects trying to build outside the public network. We've been there. We've seen that it can go wrong. Everybody's opposed to it, apart from the developers, who, you can take your ecological area and your indigenous skink and shove it up your jacksy because until you've got the infrastructure that's necessary, you're creating a recipe for disaster and you won't be clearing it up. You won't be, because like Whitford Manor you'll just go tits up and bankrupt and off you go. And guess who's left cleaning up your waste, your mess? We are, the ratepayers, the taxpayers. No, no, no, no. If this is an example of the fast-track consenting process, it's a big fat fail from me.